Scars covers an age-old trope of human sacrifice for a community as well as enslavement and abuse of an innocent child for profit, while Cursed Bunny (one of the most sinister good times in the whole book) is a revenge tale against a corporate CEO for having used his position of power and privilege to destroy a struggling family. There are a couple of Grimm-like fables, Snare being a most disquieting effort about a fox that bleeds gold. a bunch of my favorite subjects in one: ghosts, sadness, the meaning of life, people-watching, lovers. The titular story was no better, a literal rabbit curse that sends people twitching and sitting in roads. Several other stories in the collection are also about the exploitation of the disadvantaged by the power hungry — most notably “Snare,” in which a man discovers a fox with golden blood and begins to harvest it; and “Scars,” where a boy is abused first by a literal monster, then by monstrous humans.

The 1-star is really just to rage against the longest story in the collection, "Scars", which is one of the worst short stories I've read in a long time. My body was created with the things you dumped down the toilet, like your fallen-out hair and the feces you wiped off your behind.She delves into some serious stuff also, for example, feministic issues, capitalism or animal abuse. Anton Hur's translation skilfully captures the way Chung's prose effortlessly glides from being terrifying to wryly humorous. I don't need every single detail but I need enough to feel like they are real people with experiences they are sharing with me. I don't generally enjoy short story collections as I like to spend a lot of time with fictional characters and get to know and love (or despise) them.

And because we are in the wonderfully warped world of Bora Chung’s fiction, the woman proceeds to nonchalantly flush it away and leave the bathroom. Had some giant trapped inside the cave of the night sky struck their chains against some unimaginably large wall to create the stars? Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit.Trauma becomes a key aspect of these stories, with characters pushed to their limits or reacting to the world around them as informed by the horrors visited upon them. Both these stories while confronting were unique and asked some interesting questions about a woman's place in a patriarchal society. She also translates Russian and Polish into Korean while having written three novels and story collections. To me the writing style isn’t the thing that I can imagine this author wanted us to focus on as an audience.

The story here leans to the comic, with rather bemused suitors, when they realise her request, a blackmailer who says he will claim he is the father, an elderly Chaebol owner after a heir and one wannabe suitor who serenades her with Shakespeare in badly pronounced Konglish. For the most part, if you have a faint of heart, this book may not be one to opt for, but if you're in for something mind-blowing, Cursed Bunny is a must-try debut book!

As for my personal preferences, the closer to magical realism or fantasy and farther from typical horror, the better. Finally, I want to congratulate the translator Anton Hur for having two of his works longlisted this year. These stories will make your eyes pop out with horror, make you shift uncomfortably and wonder at Bora Chung’s infinite creativity.

The Embodiment is another story that looks at power structures, this time as a sharp and horrifying critique of patriarchal structures. The style varies wildly: ‘Goodbye, My Love’, a tale of AI gone awry, wouldn’t be out of place in an Alexander Weinstein collection; ‘Ruler of the Winds and Sands’ reads like a forgotten fairytale; ‘Reunion’, less outlandish than the others, is a subdued story of ghosts and twisted love set in Poland. ACT Contact / FAQ About Events / Videos Merch / Subs Sign in/up Cursed Bunny Chung, Bora More by this author.

At their best, though, these stories use a vocabulary of the grotesque to articulate truths about female bodies, living in a patriarchy, and the brutal vampiric logic of capitalism. I think the lack of pretentious similise and metaphors gives it a feeling of bluntness to cut the author in the gut and to get them to really understand what the story is about. It comes to a crescendo in “The Embodiment,” where a woman becomes mysteriously pregnant without any sexual activity. Un gran comienzo con unas verdaderamente sobresalientes historias, el impulso gradualmente disminuyendo hasta que para el final solo deseaba terminar para seguir con otra cosa. It was about two-thirds the size of an adult’s head and resembled a lump of carelessly slapped-together yellow and gray clay, with a few scattered clumps of wet hair.